


Muse

by cecilkirk



Series: fic prompts [9]
Category: Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Coffeeshop AU, Fluff, M/M, barista!brendon, writer!ryan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-22 07:03:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6069742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cecilkirk/pseuds/cecilkirk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryan finds inspiration in the last place he'd expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Muse

He was stuck in a rut, and coffee wasn’t helping. Familiar rivulets of boredom, lack of creativity, and no inspiration to pluck from his world had been filling up again for weeks; he had done nothing to stop the trickling. His fingers curl around the cup. Heat bleeds into his palm, but he doesn’t pull away. He needs change, something fresh to kick start his thoughts.

The blank document in front of him is blindingly white from the lack of words, suggesting its emptiness could be easily fixed. A sudden bitterness pries his jaw open.

“Fuck you,” he mutters at his laptop.

Light and offended above him: “I’m sorry?”

Ryan blinks, shutting his laptop out of instinctual privacy. A low wave of embarrassment blooms in his cheeks; he’d been here for hours and gotten absolutely nothing done. “Not you,” Ryan replies. “Just frustrated.”

The barista pulls out the chair across from Ryan, helping himself to his company. “Writer’s block?”

Ryan nods, chewing his lip. The sun’s been gone for quite a while; the barista’s insouciance comes from the awareness of his shift ending soon.

“Well, I’m afraid I have to kick you out for the night. We close in five minutes.” He reaches across the table to where a napkin dispenser is flush against the wall, pulls one out. For a moment, Ryan thinks he’ll jot down his number. He doesn’t; he folds in aimlessly, unfolding, refolding. Something to do.

Ryan studies how complementary the barista’s eyes are to his job. His hair needs to be cut; it’s falling across his face haphazardly. It makes Ryan want corrupt their distance and brush it away.

Maybe he really did want his number.

“But, hey,” he ( _Brendon_ reads his nametag, and Ryan doesn’t think he’ll forget it) says, not looking up from the napkin. “We’re open bright and early tomorrow. Hope tonight doesn’t deter you from your patronage.”

He grins amicably, indicating lack of seriousness. It’s bright and fills Ryan with an odd sense of buoyancy.

“It won’t,” Ryan says, packing up his things. Brendon flashes him another grin, pockets the kneaded napkin, and leaves to head behind the counter.

Ryan doesn’t doubt his appearance here tomorrow.

 

 

 

Ryan is able to reclaim his normal seat. He wonders if maybe he needs to change this up to better instigate creativity, but he quickly learns it isn’t necessary. Typically he spends a day sipping on coffee, writing sporadically, and calls it a day, blending into the background, watching the peripheral lives around him. Today, he barely looks at his screen. His fingers toy with the cord of his headphones which are dripping with saccharine love ballads. His chest fills with an embarrassment for the cheesiness of it all, but there’s something magnetic about it. This, coupled with the fact that his eyes can’t be drawn away from Brendon.

He shifted from customer to counter and back and forth with ease and comfort, the kind that came from the familiarity of routine. A smile graced his lips, oscillating in cycles of size: small behind the register, large in front of customers. It wasn’t any less sincere; if anything, the opposite. He seemed to deeply love his life, his place in the world. He was humble, but proud. Ryan deeply wanted that perpetual sunshine in his own veins, but he also felt wonderful being able to see it himself.

_He is lovely._

The thought catches Ryan off guard, but he can’t fight it; it settles into his consciousness, filling in the rivulets in his mind.

Brendon catches Ryan watching him and shoots him a grin. Not for any customer; it was broad, crinkling his eyes and asymmetrical. An imperfect beauty, and it infects Ryan’s fingers.

He writes about why flowers yearn for sunshine.

And he’s so inundated by a flood of creativity and passion and loud music that he’s startled when Brendon sits across from him.

“Hello again,” he says, smiling. “You look like you’ve beat your writer’s block.”

“I have,” Ryan says, finishing off coffee that was now lukewarm. Had Brendon been watching him, too?

“What are you writing about, if I can ask?”

Ryan watches Brendon play with one of Ryan’s pens. Ryan wants to know what digits he could scribble.

“Just, uh, whatever. Nothing really cohesive yet.” Ryan pulls his laptop toward him, attempting to be surreptitious. Brendon notices this and grins, making Ryan blush.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it, then.” He puts Ryan’s pen behind his ear before walking away. He probably hadn’t meant to; it had probably been another form of his routine seeping into his actions. Ryan could have easily stopped him, asked for it back, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He didn’t feel he had the right to disrupt the remnants of his routine. For some reason, it would have felt like sacrilege.

Ryan writes about the comfort of home and the alienation of religion.

When closing time comes, Brendon has been long gone. His routine had been altered from Ryan’s perception. An odd, achey sadness insinuates its way between his bones. Brendon didn’t live for Ryan; he was lucky to admire any of this at all.

Nevertheless, newly creaky joints make packing his stuff a little more difficult.

 

 

 

Because of the rain, Ryan almost doesn’t go to the coffeeshop. He fears for his computer’s safety, of course, but it doesn’t stop him. He has a greater fear of his newfound source of creativity ending. He fears he’ll miss his muse. Ultimately, he braves the elements so he can take part in secondhand routine for the third consecutive day.

But his routine doesn’t arrive—or rather, the routine he’s adhered himself to. Brendon’s gone. An off day, maybe? The reason wouldn’t matter; it was still jarring. Ryan struggles to find his own routine, now dusty, shoved in the back of his mind, the crooks of his knees, the space between his knuckles. What is normally a walk becomes bounding leaps and dangerous, exhaustive jumps.

He is disappointed but not surprised when he writes nothing.

How had Brendon affected him so deeply, so irreparably? How had one man’s simple existence been such a beacon of…of what? Light? Misplaced affection? How had he had the power to unravel and re-braid Ryan’s insides?

Ryan taps his keyboard, watching as meaningless letters march across the screen.

He knew what he needed to do.

 

 

 

Through the filter of post-dawn light, Brendon walked to work. It was short, which was convenient It provided the opportunity to leave him with his thoughts for a few minutes, let some crisp morning air clean out his lungs. Instilled in him was a productivity simply from this; it allowed him to build upon it for the rest of the day.

He loved it, and he had missed it yesterday. He enjoyed sleeping in too, of course, but he felt lazy the rest of the day, an unshakeable feeling of minor failure. He was glad to break his routine, but he was even more so to fall back into it.

He sets his sweatshirt in his locker and pulls out his apron. Swinging the door shut, a sheet of paper floats and tumbles through the air before gracing itself on the floor. He picks it up, unfolds the irregular creasing, hearing it crinkle through coffee stains.

Something is typewritten (skimming it, Brendon sees it’s about flowers) but in the margins, scrawled in pen:

_You were my muse when I needed one. I hope I can be something of necessity for you._

A string of digits on the very bottom.

Brendon grins, pulling out his phone.

The writer hadn’t needed to hope at all.


End file.
